Dell User Forum ANZ

For the past two years Dell has been putting on large customer information days.The first one was Dell Storage Forum in Randwick, Sydney, Australia which was all about, you guessed it, storage and information management. Last year we decided to change the name and include most of the portfolio at Dell Enterprise Forum in Melbourne. Both years have been very successful with almost 700 customers last year in Melbourne.

Now we’re in the third year and we just had to change the name again :). This year it’s called Dell User Forum and is in Sydney on the 15th of October at Randwick racecourse. This will be twice the size as the event in Melbourne with over 20 technical breakouts and heaps of hands on labs. Not only will there be enterprise content but also security and mobility content as well, but the best news is I’ll be there again.

We recently held DUF in the us in Miami last month. It was massive and all the videos and technical documents are available here if you are super keen http://dellenterpriseforum.com/us/

It’s a free event and a good way of keeping up to date with current trends and also getting some free training. If you see me come and say Hi.

Voice Recognition

On a side that it wants a move the selected text above seems a bit strange. I’m trawling at Ross and logs using a headset because well I’m pretty lazy and this seems like an easy way of doing. The only issue is it doesn’t really understand my thickest running backs in very well tside of a loss of the words come at a news quite interesting senses. When I talk in American accent it seems to understand me completely by the sound a bit strange and mike use the committee on hey dad was wrong with you. I’ll let you know I had this voice experiment does in the future. PS this spot I didn’t get that old and it might make no sense.

Wow …Now here is that paragraph the way I actually said it.

On a side note it may seem like the text above seems a bit strange. I’m trialing voice recognition software using a headset because, well, I’m pretty lazy and this seems like an easy way of doing it. The only issue is it doesn’t really understand my thick Australian accent very well and a lot of the words come out quite interestingly. When I talk in American accent it seems to understand me completely but it sounds a bit strange and the kids are like “hey dad whats wrong with you.” I’ll let you know I how this voice experiment does in the future.

It also doesn’t help that the Windows Speech recognition only really works in Notepad or Office.

It’s that time of year again. Dell is hosting our big Australian tech day in Melbourne on the 19th of November. Last year it was Storage focused, this year it’s been expanded to include the less important but still useful parts of the business like Network & Servers (Can you tell I’m a storage guy?)

Actually, it’s going to be a one day showcase of all things Dell Enterprise from End User Compute to Data Protection to HPC and our new Flash Optimized Compellent.

It’s a traditional tech day format, keynote and then heaps of breakout sessions for different streams depending what you care about.

One thing that is great for this DEF is the amount of big names and Execs from Asia and the US coming over to present like:

Mike Clemm – or Mr Compellent to you. He designed the Data Progression technology in Compellent

Chad Fenner – I haven’t met chad yet but I’ve been told there is nothing he doesn’t know about blades

Emily Rund – ALL things NAS and FluidFS

As well as a bunch of other guys who know their stuff.

I will be helping out with all the blogging and twitter stuff again this year. If you are a Melbourne based tech blogger feel free to reach out to me and we’ll get you involved.One idea at the moment is we will set up either a specific lunch or beers for the bloggers and give them one-on-one time with the guys that drive our product development. You’ll be able to ask the tough questions that you or your readership want answered.

eg. Why does VSAN have a big V? Í’ve had years of writing small ones with vSphere, why mess with me now. It’s like Apple releasing the IWatch, instead of iWatch. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS??? WHHHHHY?

You get the idea. Best bet to get me is via twitter @danmoz or my email is daniel_morris1@dell.com – yes that is a 1, don’t ask….

Those following me on twitter would have been sick to death of hearing me talk about it but the Aussie Dell Storage Forum (DSF) has come and gone and it was a bloody good day .. very long, but good. It was the best opportunity we have had to showcase Dell’s growing storage solutions and portfolio in Australia and the feedback so far has been very positive :).

Imma let me keep this post short, but @PenguinPunk has one of the best event overviews of all time (cause it saves me lots of time)

The keynote was the same style as the Boston DSF with the whiteboard and talking about where Fluid Data is heading, especially around Fluid Cache and AppAssure. It was a bit different to Carter George’s slow and steady wins the race style Brett Roscoe lead it well and was really funny. The room was so packed that I heard there were 50 – 80 people outside the room watching on the big screen.

There there were four main session tracks, Compellent, EqualLogic, Powervault and “everything else” :). I was in the everything else stream presenting the first two AppAssure sessions with Andrew Diamond. I was handling the live demo .. yes .. live demo, danger, and it was running on the worlds largest laptop – a Precision M6700 – it had more guts than my R710 PowerEdge server but after lugging it around for two days I am now an inch and a half shorter (In height, mind out of gutter please). It all went well and no one asked me to repeat myself because of mumbling so I consider that a win!

For those who don’t know Andrew, I am like the Robin to his Batman for Dell Storage in Queensland and NT … because being from QLD, we love hanging out in our undies (thanks Dave). Not a whole lot that boy doesn’t know. I help him out with things like cranking up the the twitter machine and which meme is appropriate where

On the floor was where most of the action was with two racks full of kit and a bunch of the storage specialists answering questions and doing live demos. It had a bunch of new kit including:

Lunch for the masses apparently was good, I got to have fancy lunch with all the media dudes because I am a “blogger”. I think I’m going to rock up to other tech or fashion shows and say “I’m a blogger, food please”. One feedback I had about the public lunch was that the salmon was the driest they had ever eaten. I just assumed there was a salmon walking around cracking jokes like:

What are the two sexiest animals in the barn yard? “Brown chicken brown cow”.

We topped it off with a few tasty beverages at the end of the day including these blue Fluid Cocktails – they had some kick – and Prinnie from the Voice singing some tunes, the girl can sing.

It doesn’t just stop there, here is a list of all the sessions that were run during the day. If there is something that interests you and you want to find out more about it, contact your Dell sales team and we’ll help you out. If you’re not currently a customer all good, either contact me through the blog or on twitter and we can go from there. Don’t forget to ask about DPACK assessment as well.

One of the highlights of the day is that this tweet made it on the big board

The good stuff, the stuff that makes you want to sit up straight and turn off Gangnam Style for 5 minutes.

Competitions and prizes. Prizes and competitions. Actually, I don’t know why I am excited. I have been working for vendors for 10 years now so I’m never allowed to bloody win anything. Just because I can rig it, not fair.

Sorry, went to a dark place there

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One thing Dell does well is Laptops so it makes sense to give away .. laptops. Sexy laptops. Laptops so hot that could make butter melt, but they’re not actually hot, they’re cool, so cool they’re hot. Umm, got myself mixed up there. Short story is they look nice and don’t warm your lap. I should be a novelist.

The good thing about trade shows is new stuff, and DSF Sydney is no exception. Actually there are a few so I will keep this to the point.

Hybrid EqualLogic storage array – SSD and NLSAS in the same shelf.

Compellent FS8600 – Unified NAS for Compellent

AppAssure 5.3 with Linux support

FluidFS support for Quest SharePoint Maximizer

Dell Active Infrastructure

Hybrid EqualLogic storage array

The PS65x0ES is a pretty nifty box. It is based on the 48 drive sumo form factor but with 7 SSD drives and 41 NLSAS drives. The array acts as one pool of storage and tiers data automatically, giving you the SSD punch with the NLSAS fat capacity. It would suit apps like VDI, some databases and high bandwidth media.

PS6500ES is the 1Gbit version

PS6510ES is the 10Gbit version

Another bonus is that the new VMware HIT kit will be released. The HIT kit version is 3.5 and supports ESX 5.1 now and the new EqualLogic v6 firmware. I wrote it like that because a lot of the marketing material says HIT/VMware 3.5 which confuses everyone cause this think it’s for VMware version 3.5.

Compellent FS8600

Being a NAS guy at heart, I was personally very happy to see the FS8600 get released. It’s high performance, scale-out NAS for Compellent. The FS8600 runs the same FluidFS system that the NX3600 and FS7600 uses but it is fully integrated in the Compellent management systems.

It tweaked to maximise the thin-all-day-everyday-ness of Compellent as well as taking full advantage of the automatic tiering benefits that made Compellent famous in the first place.

It’s a 2U box that contains two clustered controllers, so they are active-active with mirrored write cache. We can get up to 4 x FS8600’s to act as a single namespace serving out a single share up to 1PB in size. That’s the figures but no one I know needs a filesystem that big at the moment, at least not in Australia. On the sister FS7500/FS7600 systems I am more commonly seeing shares about the 50 – 100TB mark.

It supports replication, AV, quotas etc, but I think it’s main advantage is that because it front ends Compellent, Compellent will auto tier your NAS data, so the new and hot data is on tier 1, and the old stuff no one is using gets moved to cheap tier 3 disk.

I intend on doing a more in depth techo post in the next couple of weeks.

AppAssure 5.3 with Linux support

AppAssure is another product I have been meaning to write about but time and sleep have gotten in the way. It’s a next gen backup system that Dell bought a few months ago. It uses snapshots and deltas to trickle feed backups over the course of the day, forever incremental style. Instead of the nightly big bang backups that smash the system, it’s spread over the course of the day and sent to a centralised core system to minimise impact to prod systems. It’s a great way of looking at backups and I have been treating it like my little baby since it came out. It doesn’t fit everywhere but for a lot of customers I meet it’s a great fit, and quite affordable too.

Again, I intend on adding much more content about AppAssure .. promise. In the mean time, its free for a 14 day trial and takes about 30 mins to setup … pieceofpissmate

The big addition is Linux support but the bulk deploy features will save a lot of admins a fair chunk of time. Here are the main updates in AppAssure Software (V5.3.1)

FluidFS support for Quest SharePoint Maximizer

If you didn’t know, Dell acquired Quest Software last month which added about 42000* new products to the Dell Software offerings (*slight exaggeration).

One of those products is the Quest Storage Maximizer for SharePoint which now supports Dell’s FluidFS platform.

“Quest Storage Maximizer (SMAX) is the most efficient and lightest weight external storage solution for SharePoint on the market. Files that are typically housed within SQL can be externalized and stored on a Fluid File System (Fluid FS) thus reducing the burden on SQL and increasing SharePoint performance.”

What that is saying is that using the Quest tool, we can use FluidFS as the storage for all your SharePoint data, instead of messy blobs inside a SQL database. Not only does SharePoint go quicker, but it can scale a hell of a lot easier.

Dell Active Infrastructure

This one I’m still catching up with. Dell vStart all in one solutions have been around for a while, this now adds converged infrastructure directly in the blade chassis with a new IO Aggregator and unified management across the system. Dell is also offering these systems will pre-integrated, optimised software and solutions like SharePoint out of the box which will be fantastic. I am picturing a situation where a customer tells me they are looking at implementing SharePoint 2013 and will need to buy some more storage and compute as we as come services to set it all up. Instead I give them one product number and the new system arrives in a few weeks, already racked, already cabled with SharePoint installed and running and ready for production. Tres sexy.

It’s only just been announced so not a lot of in-depth info yet, lets hope what I am thinking is right! And I also hope you can customise those stickers on the rack, like this.

This Wednesday the 24th Oct the inaugural Dell Storage Forum kicks off in Sydney. I’m really looking forward to it, and not just because this will be my first presenting job in front of a large audience (well, co-presenting). We have had 100’s and 100’s of registrations so far so if everyone turns out it’s going to be awesome. I will be doing the AppAssure sessions so come say hi

It’s going to be a pretty full day, the presenters have been asked to get there at 7am to get setup – that’s 6am Brisbane time. Curse you non-daylight savings time Brisbane. I’m going to be a bleary eyed wreck.

The hastag for the day is #DellSFau. Remember that because a prize could potentially be in your future.

One thing I am really happy with is the level of Dell US exec attendance, for the keynote and sessions throughout the day.

Good news everyone, the Dell Storage Forum is coming to Sydney, Australia on October 24th 2012. It will be similar to the DSF in Boston, London, Paris and Mumbai and will be a mix of futures, tech deep dives and a fair bit of hands on. It will be a one day event that will go through the growing array of arrays Dell has – Compellent, EqualLogic and PowerVault and also all the new sexy stuff like the DR4000, DX and AppAssure.

It’s going to be held at the Australia Technology Park, Locomotive St in Eveleigh, near Redfern train station. Of all the years I lived in Sydney I don’t think I have ever been in Eveleigh so it should be interesting to check it out. You can get all the transport details here.

To kick things off here is a really good video of Dell’s storage vision from the first DSF in Boston earlier in the year. It’s 50 mins long but gives a great insight to how all Dell’s hardware and acquisitions are coming together to form Fluid Data. It involves the new Poweredge 12G servers, Dell Storage, RNA networks and AppAssure to really give an interesting and different view on storage consumption and management.

There will be some great speakers from around the world

An interesting touch is a pre-written “Convince your manager” document that has all the reasons, incentives and excuses you need to get your manager to fly you to Sydney. You can download, insert your name and send to your manager – easy.

It’s free to attend and will be a great day so hopefully you can come. I am still trying to work out what my involvement on the day will be. I might have to do some talking but I’m hoping I can be more involved in the social side of it or at least something fun. Expect a few more posts leading up to the event, I’m hoping to organise a tweetup ala VMware style or something similar.